By Cal Lutheran News“I’m all in.”
John A. Nunes’ words were short and succinct — just seven letters in all — but they were delivered with resolute conviction. As he addressed the packed audience inside the Gilbert Sports and Fitness Center last fall, Nunes made it clear he was embracing the responsibility of leading California Lutheran University into the future as the school’s ninth president.
The Oct. 17 inauguration ceremony, part of a busy slate of Founders Day and Homecoming activities, was attended by a mix of students, faculty, staff, regents, donors and local dignitaries. They listened intently as Nunes stood at the podium and pledged to uphold the school’s commitment to “educational rigor” and “inclusive equity.”
“This work is worth the blood, the sweat, the tears and the prayers,” he said. “This mission is worth fighting for and donating to, so we might see gritty dreams take flight for insiders as well as for outsiders, for the first and the finest as well as for the last and the laughed at.”
Nunes, who has a PhD in postcolonial identity from Chicago’s Lutheran School of Theology, joined Cal Lutheran as interim president in the summer of 2024. Impressed by his mission-focused leadership, the Board of Regents made the appointment permanent on June 1, 2025.
“I used to be an IN-terim, but now I’m all in,” Nunes said. “That’s why you can call this an in-stallation, in-auguration (and an) in-vestiture. I am in-vested with gratitude.”
Nunes is an ordained Lutheran minister who served as president of Concordia College New York from 2016 to 2021. He was president and CEO of Lutheran World Relief and held an endowed professorship at Valparaiso University. Since 2020, he has worked to encourage robust debate among students as a member of the Academic Leaders Task Force on Campus Free Expression.
Senior Ashlyn Bryson-Beane, president of the Associated Students of California Lutheran University Government, spoke during the ceremony and implored Nunes to keep fighting for students.
“You make students feel valued and seen,” she said. “Let the mark of your leadership be helping the entire university community ensure that each student knows that their whole person and their voice are valuable.”
Sharon Docter, PhD, chair of the Faculty Assembly, urged Nunes to be a “leader who listens well to students, staff and faculty.”
“May you be our partner as you lead with the confidence that comes from trust in one another and in our shared mission,” Docter said.
The Rev. Lamont Wells, executive director of the Network of ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) Colleges and Universities, called Nunes “a theologian, a teacher, a truth-teller” who is uniquely suited to expand Cal Lutheran’s role as a “sanctuary of scholarship” and “a laboratory of leadership.”
“This is a campus of belonging, and a community of becoming,” Wells said. “We proclaim that every student, regardless of background, is of sacred worth.”
Under Nunes’ leadership, Wells said Cal Lutheran “will not retreat into nostalgia but rise into newness.”
“We will reimagine theological education for the bi-vocational leaders who will shepherd both sanctuaries and societies. We will be bold about belonging, fierce about fairness, and grounded in grace,” he said.
“Times are tense,” Wells noted, and “higher education is under attack,” but he expressed confidence that Nunes can lead Cal Lutheran through it all.
“Under his guidance, this campus will be a lamp on a hill, radiating light in a time of division and despair,” Wells said.
Nunes’ wife, Monique Nunes, known as “Ms. Mo” across campus, introduced her husband.
“As a double immigrant — born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, raised in Canada, and now a United States citizen — John embodies the promise of the American dream,” she said. “But more importantly, he redefines that dream. For him, success is not only about titles or position, it’s about service — about lifting others as he climbs and about creating opportunities for those whose voices have yet to be heard.”
The mission of the university is to educate leaders for a global society who are strong in character and judgment, confident in their identity and vocation, and committed to service and justice.
The new president said he wants to ensure California Lutheran remains a university where “faith and reason dance together, where good questions ground critical reflection in the classroom as well as creative action in the laboratory of the world.”
He said he is honored to lead a campus marked by both academic and athletic excellence. “I am grateful beyond words to join this miracle yet in the making,” Nunes said.
“I am grateful beyond words to join this miracle yet in the making,” Nunes said.
During the Inauguration: Investiture and Founders Day Service, Nunes presented glass artist Mark Eric Gulsrud ’72 with the Christus Award, given annually to individuals who have helped strengthen the bridge between the church and the university.
Gulsrud, who earned his bachelor’s degree in art at Cal Lutheran, designed the stained glass in Samuelson Chapel. Nunes called his work a magnificent melding where “glass and light become an invitation to reflection, wonder and even the possibility of glimpsing the very face of God.”
As a young boy in the 1950s, Gulsrud remembers climbing to the top of Mount Clef with his dad, Ernie, who would go on to serve as a founding member of the Cal Lutheran Board of Regents from 1959 to the mid-1980s.
“As we looked down upon orange and walnut groves, (my dad) shared his dream of what the university would become,” Gulsrud said.
Though his work can be seen in sacred and public spaces throughout the United States, British Columbia and Western Europe, getting to create stained glass for his alma mater was a full-circle moment that he treasures.
“My studies at Cal Lutheran were foundational in my development as a person and as an artist,” Gulsrud said as he accepted the award. “The nurturing and supportive environment provided a strong foundation for my career in the liturgical arts.”
